 It's crazy how labels sign influencers these days to me. It's so interesting, but you don't hear any conversations heavy about it. The influencers that are being signed by labels, I think Xeas people were actually pretty aware of. There was a decent awareness, but so many of these smaller ones, curators, influencers, from what I've heard, typically it doesn't seem like a massive life-changing amount for a lot of them, but it's more like, hey man, we'll keep throwing you some bread if you make sure you respond to the emails in a timely manner. We'll get your passes to all the fans, so we'll make your lifestyle look good. Exactly. I want to know what the signings look like. If you had to sign an influencer, so I wouldn't take a label deal. I'm in an exclusive deal if I was an influencer, unless they were going crazy. And the ones that I know who are signed, they don't have an exclusive deal. But if you were a label, how would you approach it? If I was a label, how would I approach an influencer? If I had to just have it my way, and I'm going to say, what kind of influencers would you be going towards going at? And what kind of deals would you try to break bread with them on? I think, so if I was the label, I would go after music reviewers. Like people who just review music, any type of reaction channel or reviewers type of channel. I would go after the music blog promo pages, so the Instagram accounts, the TikTok accounts. And I would go after meme accounts that have a music-focused audience. So there's one page I follow called Grand Wizard Chatmigas built off the DJ Academic brand. It's a meme page, but he has a music-focused audience. So pages like that, or that is another one called Tyrone. Tyrone has a, which I actually think might be owned by a really big entity. But if I was a label, I would go after those. And so I think there would be a couple of different ways I would try to do it. The pages, meme accounts, music pages, I'll probably try to like outright buy. And maybe just offer the creator like a really large buyout deal. Look at how much money you're making here. Okay, you generate $150k. You know what I'm saying? I'll give you... Not even, most of them. Yeah, but let's just... Okay. Let the big ones get a right. Probably try to bottom out right just so I can hire somebody internally. Or bottom out right and then give them a job. Like, yo, I'll give you, I don't know, $400k for the page and then hire you on under $85k of your salary or something to keep running the page. Right? But now we're going to just keep it exclusive to our artists. Well, maybe not even that. Maybe even be like, yo, you can still take whatever promo money you get from it. But like whenever we got some shit that need to go up on this page, that shit going up on it. This gas. We need to press the gas at full blown. This is coverage daily news for this artist, that type of vibe. Yeah. I think the ones that have a brand, like their face attached to it, that's a harder one. Because I think hiring them as almost like an employee, like a similar bi-model and interming to an employee will probably be what makes the most sense as a label, but they're not going for that. You know what I'm saying? A smart one wouldn't go for that. Yeah. So I will probably just try to work out some type of a yearly lump sum while either I get a certain amount of artists I can push you that you have to do or it affords me an extremely discounted promo rate. So if you can typically charge in 10K per video, I want it for 800. You know what I'm saying? And in order to get it for 800, I'm going to give you, I don't know, 100K upfront right now. You know what I'm saying? Or something. Because if I know how to, yo, I might have, you know what I'm saying? Like I might push this one artist to you shit eight times a year alone. You know what I'm saying? That's going to save me 80 bands. Yeah. In that scenario, like 80 bands plus, you know what I'm saying? Like in Lawrence, I'm willing to do that right now. I know I got at least five or six like that. And I think a lot of influencers would do that. Like the label was like, yo, I'm going to pay you to still pay you. It just needs to be a discounted rate. Most of them are going to go for that. They're going to go for that. Because I don't think they will be thinking of it the same way. But I don't know. I've never thought about it. I would love to talk to like one of the ones that have done it and see like, because I feel like most of them just get hired, bro. They get like, boy, I'm almost at work. A whole lot of them will get hired. I think I like to buy out deal. Like for the mean pages, because the mean pages without having a face, you can damn near throw anybody. I like keeping the same person in the role because they're already, you know, they know it. It's the cost of training and all that stuff. You don't have to deal with any of that stuff. Just let them let them rock or I keep them numbers up. And the complexity definitely comes for the individual influencer because the individual influencer has more of a brand to uphold. You can't just throw somebody or play some. We've seen people do that. And it's a hard game, man. And at brain and introducing other people, you can't just dip off. But I think the lump sum deal is nice. I think it would be, I'll probably focus on orchestrated campaigns and somebody that makes sense for their brand. So you have to be a lot more select. That's another reason why you can't just buy them all out. You'd have to say, all right, this person is great for this audience and maybe I'm focused heavy on R&B or maybe I'm focused heavy on rock. You know, if I'm going to somebody who's general but impactful, let's insert like Anthony Vantana, which he probably would never do that. But okay, those people would be one off. I would never try to buy them out because it's just too, it's too much of a variety. But somebody who's like in my bag. So if I'm an indie label, especially I try to come up with some kind of relationship where you can curate because major labels are I haven't seen them be good at. At truly maybe they don't have the time to or funny enough, the resources to really bring their attention to using a lot of those influences right on the long term. But any labels, like they're real, they're creative. They get it. They get the shit. I think to a lot of the, at least the situations I've seen in the past that I was pretty sure was an influencer signed to a major label is they go from being, like you said, like a trusted voice of the of the E streets, if you will, right? When the music says like, I know this guy put me onto a bunch of random stuff. And then I don't know where they just go to like only talking about bigger artists, right? Or only covering bigger artists. And it's like, I don't think the labels realize when they make them make that change that they're killed off the brand trust of the influencers. So over time, the value of the influence is like, it starts to decrease from the moment they start doing that. And then it's like a lot of especially like music curators. A lot of them maintain that reputation by being able to say like there were the first ones to talk about somebody. Right. So now if it's like, I mean, unless you was a label, like, you know, of course, I guess if you have your smaller artists, you can still help them kind of maintain that that image that look, but it's like they don't have the ability to like naturally go out there. There's a there's a artist that pops every couple of months. They're like, every music creator knows, like, if I don't make a post talking about this person, I'm going to look out the loop. So I feel like when influencers get locked into these label deals or where they can't talk about those artists, they look like they're out the loop. Exactly. Yeah. So then their audience starts to lose trust in them. And then the effect of basically making how effective they are, like, like less, you know. And so I think that's what allows them. Speaking of, I think you, you touched on something why TikTok curators have brought so much value to underground marketing again, because one, we know the transferability from TikTok is stupid when like somebody just look when something happens on TikTok, it can move. So in their curator impact is better than any of the other curative impacts I've seen, you know, as like half decade. But because of that personal out the loop aspect of things, you can truly activate a campaign and get people to talk about you without ever having to, well, I don't say ever having to pay, but paying cheaper pages that they're following, right? Just to get discovered by them. And then because they got the FOMO, I got to be the first to introduce them. Then you use that human behavior for them to go ahead and start putting you out into this, you know, how about to say man of sphere, the artist sphere, the industry sphere, all that stuff right there. Because, because like once you could tap into human behavior and wins, that's why the open verse challenges were so big for a second, right? Because now it's playing into the artist ego for me to get seen. So I'm a flex, right? And then I see other people are actually getting attention from this. So that's even more important for me to get in. Oh, dang. And I actually might end up on a track, right? That becomes even another game. So it. And at the end of the day, you get all this game from people putting out your own song. So it was just a perfect human behavior experiment. And whenever, so like when you look at these curators, like, because I feel like it hasn't been legitimate curators in the last five years. I haven't been that many of them. It was like a deficit. But now with TikTok, it's a lot of like legitimate, like, you know, upcoming curators that people truly look at for their opinion on music. You know what I mean? It was almost because we know there were some pages on Instagram. There were that curated music, but it almost wasn't cool for some for a while. Yeah. I mean, I think the Instagram community, there's a lot more like blog is like you can tell it bars from like traditional right. Right. So TikTok feels more. It's like it feels like a million. I'm trying to think of a person like a million. Like I guess like DJ academics, right? It's just like all these small personalities with faces attached to where it's like, yeah, Instagram is more like, oh, here's a, here's a big brand that is maintained. It's like, like no different in like a complex, right? Or pigeons and planes or something. So I think, I think that's the difference in it. Like TikToks feel a lot more personal because you can't really, I mean, but even TikTok has like big, or it's starting to build a culture of like big music repost pages like Instagram. Like it's still in its infantile. It's hard to be successful though. Yeah. It's very hard. I think I maybe know of like four or five that do it really well. They didn't already have a brand, but like their own TikTok building a brand is a faceless, faceless music curator. Very hard thing to do on TikTok. See, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Real curators are coming back because you are not a curator if you're a brand. Yeah. There's no way a brand can legitimately be a real curator at scale. Most of them at least, right? Because, you know, it becomes more commercial and people don't really know who they're trusting. And it just doesn't work. Colors has probably been the best I've seen like in the modern era in space. I was like colors and probably pigeons and planes. Pigeons and planes. I don't consider them modern anymore. Oh man. You know what I mean? They're current. You know what I mean? They're still doing their thing and they're some of the best. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah, like they've been around in the game for a minute. You know what I mean? Colors has too, but like colors is still like catching a new wave because of the video format and all that stuff. Pigeons and planes isn't that. It's traditional, right? But I'm saying like when you go back, the DJs used to be curators. It was a person. And you know if I go listen to this dude, this dude sets going to go a certain way. This guy has a certain type of taste. You know what I mean? That actually means something. And when you listen to these individual curators on TikTok, it's another person. Again, I already know what he vibes with, the type of stuff he hates, especially the ones who do commentary, right? Like what they don't like. And just like a news story where you might watch four or five different channels or four or five people talk about the same issue. Like I'm willing to now go see what that curator thinks. This guy thinks that way, but I wonder if he's rocking with the new Kendra Lamar track or the new Yeet shit or whatever it is, you know?